When I whined about the e-mailing, blogging, Tweeting, websiting, "liking," selling-of-our-souls required in this new age of publicizing publishing, Karen fired back with: Oh, please, give me back the days when I wrote on a typewriter.

Click for video ☟In his own words:I disassemble typewriters and then reassemble them into full-scale, anatomically correct human figures. I do not solder, weld, or glue these assemblages together- the process is entirely cold assembly. I do not introduce any part to the assemblage that did not come from a typewriter.

Dear Jeremy:

While you're at it, could you program them to knock out a few chapters?

Monday, February 13, 2012

At first glance cookie baker extraordinaire, foodie and all around Kitchen Goddess~~KG~~Lee Hilton & I are polar opposites. She stays up all night cracking eggs and shaving chocolate. I get up with the sun and reupholster wing chairs with my kids' cast off blue jeans.

But like the best friendships, we have a symmetry. When I moved from New Jersey I gave her my grandmother's c.1917 bridge suits cookie cutters. When Lee moved west, she mailed me her collection of fabric scraps. (I used some to fashion the chair piping.)

We have plenty in common, including our love of the written word. Lee's an invaluable "cold reader." When I mentioned that my Chick Palace heroine Lilly Covington would be divorced twice from the same guy, it was Lee who quipped, "She'll call him Ex-ex."

In the meantime, speaking of piping, you can imagine how flattered I was yesterday when she called needing help with her post on goat cheese chocolate truffles. Me! In the same essay with Manhattan pastry chef Leigh Friend & lines like"mysteriously delicious and not overwhelmingly sweet." Yes, I was able to help. Toward the end of her essay, after the bridge details & the recipe, within"Kitchen Goddess notes,"

you'll find my 2 word contribution: coping saw.

Remember: symmetry. And these are perfect for nibbling while you read The Chick Palace.

She applied every shell by hand, building patterns off mounded surfaces to play off the shadows. Thousands of abalone shells shimmer in the diffused light as if they were underwater. Mesmerizing.

Benjamin Krebs photo

.

Her website says Blott travels the world with seashells in her suitcase. (France is home base.) Thanks to her generosity I left Newport with a healthy amount of haliotis assinima in mine.

At home I propped a stretched canvas, plugged in the glue gun and played with placement. As a writer, I recognize false starts but it's tougher pulling glued abalone shells off canvas than deleting a bad paragraph.

Just the way characters in my imagination eventually take on lives of their own, shells of various sizes & shades began to create patterns as they caught the light. You might say they spoke to me. Or you might say I finally got the hang of it & stopped burning my fingers.

Either way, rhythm developed & patterns emerged.

And after 14 years the awkward blank space over the fireplace has been filled.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Yesterday's blogseems to have set off a lot of pings! in the nostalgia department. Recollections of the cut & paste days. Fun recollections. Do we want them back? Not so much.

Michele Ivy Davis, a California-based writer, even commented that back in the day she ironed manuscript submissions that were returned wrinkled: "I sure didn't want to type them all over again!"

Seriously Generation X & Yers, Downton Abbey's footmen were not the only ones who put irons to paper. (As an aside, we also ironed our hair & nearly everything that came out of a washing machine.)

The computer revolutionized the production process but until fairly recently they were still printed & mailed. Even rejected manuscripts were returned. (S.A.S.E.!) With cover letters. These however, are other blog topics.

"Oh and think of what we've lost. The writing process of all the famous writers of the 21st century will never be documented by typewritten pages with handwritten notes on display at the Morgan Library, etc. Ah, progress."

Mine are not at the Morgan. They're in the basement bound in rubber bands gone brittle and crumbly.

With the exception of my spiral binder full of notes and research information, THE CHICK PALACE, 40,000 copies sold & counting, exists via attachments, CD files, cyber copies and JPEG covers.

It reminds me of how far we've come & perhaps what we've traded in the process.

This includes singles who think it's more personal to type a letter then send an e-mail. (I digress but back in the day, personal correspondence, from love letters to thank you notes, had to be handwritten, never~fans cheeks~typed.)

I wrote my high school term papers, book reports and college essays on that already-vintage-vintage Underwood family heirloom. (Except when I could talk my mother into letting me dictate to her.)

Phil Patton, Just My Typewriter

By the time I broke into the fiction market, I had a hand-me-down IBM Selectric. It was being tossed (I use the term loosely) at my husband's office & weighed about as much as my 2 youngest children combined. To lug it to the repair shop, after strapping the toddlers into the backseat, required its own seatbelt on the passenger side. (Remember when weight on the passenger seat signaled "person" & cars would not start unless seatbelts were fastened?)

I admit a fondness for the tapping,

the rhythmic strike of keys against roller carriage,

the imprint of letters on bond,

and that nostalgic ping! at the end of the line.

There were, however, a few essentials left out of the TV piece.

If you could not spell, you spent an inordinate amount of time doing this:

☟ ☟ ☟

If you could not spell and were a self-taught typist, there was way too much of this:

Even if you could spell & type, if you wanted to revise a paragraph, you either retyped the entire page or resorted to this:

& this:

Since the introduction of the computer, virtual cut & paste and spellcheck, one of the biggest changes in publishing has been revision. We re-write, hone & polish with ease. We do more of it. A lot more of it.

This puts the swearing, hair-pulling, pacing & meltdowns where they belong ☞ with the creative process.

I was on my fourth book with Scholastic when my editor called to chat about the bottom line: they loved my work & working with me, but copy editing my manuscripts for spelling & typing errors was taking too much of their time. If I wanted to continue, I'd have to get a computer. With spellcheck.

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About Me

I write.
30 books have made it into print, beginning with my agent's simultaneous sale of my YA mystery SOMETHING OUT THERE and adult romance A TOUCH OF SCANDAL. I'm back in the fray with the eBook launch of THE CHICK PALACE.
I teach.
As adjunct faculty, I run critique workshops and mentor students in the MFA Writing Popular Fiction program of Seton Hill University. (The only genre fiction MFA in North America)
I consult.
On the side I critique & edit manuscripts for aspiring writers.
With a degree in art and an early background in advertising and fundraising copy & design, I've got other irons in the fire, too.